Methodology of comparative law

The value of findings of comparative studies and their efficacy largely depend on research methodology. Because of this, one of the main topics in comparative law is understanding the existing research methods used in the literature. Questions and topics related to research methods in comparative law were raised for the first time in the late 19th century by German lawyers. It was then followed and expanded by researchers in other countries, especially France, Italy and the United States; and along with the development of other sciences, new approaches to comparative law were increasingly developed. In Iran, however, the field has been very limited and largely confined to practical and scattered advices on how to do comparative law research. In this paper, I try to introduce different qualitative and quantitative methods of comparative law research, with the focus on the state-of-the-art methods. I then describe the main steps necessary to comparative law research, existing and potential problems at every stage and ways to deal with them.